In the field of animal husbandry the loss of animals due to illness, loss to predators, or theft can be costly to the owners of the animals. Accordingly it is known to be desirable to employ monitoring systems to track the location of animals, particularly livestock animals, to attempt to minimize losses.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,188,869 by Wangrud discloses one example of a kit and method for monitoring and tracking animals using a GPS locator implanted subcutaneously into an animal for transmission to a smartphone. The smartphone then determines if the animal is outside of a respective boundary which indicates a potential theft of an animal or an animal which has broken free of its enclosure. The locator implanted on the animal must regularly transmit its position to the smarthphone to determine if an alarm condition exists, however, the continuous transmission of data requires considerable battery power and available bandwidth for large herds.